Space craft re-entry, heat?

Question

would it be possible to augment the heat produced by re-entry into a plasma which could be deflected from spacecraft by an electrical charge? or would the heat radiation be a completely different effect even in plasma

wondering also why people struck by lightning are not vaporized by the tens of thousands of degrees heat generated by lightning's plasma/heat

Answer 1

You are basically proposing a force field for the Shuttle.

Thing is the heat generated is caused by the friction on the surfaces of the ship (i.e. it is not a plasma till it has interacted with the ship's surfaces and heated itself up).  Placing a force field in front of the ship to deflect air is just not doable.  Even if it were the equipment to generate that field would be massive and require staggering amounts of energy to operate.  You'd never get it off the ground in the first place.

As for lightning being hot it is but it is in a very, very small space.  They generate temperatures hotter than the core of the sun regularly in particle accelerators.  But it is just a few tiny particles doing it.  If you somehow managed to grab one you probably would not even notice (it'd zap a few atoms off you although being in a particle accelerator would be a bad place to be for other reasons).

So, the lighting will fry whatever it touches but the area is very small and very short lived.  Not nearly enough to vaporize you (although will still mess you up pretty good).